Archive • October 2011

Sorley Maclean’s Island (1974) Source: Scottish Screen Archive Duration: 4’19” (excerpt) In an excerpt from a 22-minute film, the poet Sorley Maclean (1911-1966), the “father of the Scottish Gaelic renaissance,” recites two poems (in Gaelic) at a ceilidh, followed by scenes of his native island of Raasay, where Scottish Gaelic was the first language, during

Prices Unlimited (1944) Director: Erle C. Kenton Source: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive Collection: War Film Collection Duration: 10’30” In a narrative short produced by Universal Pictures for the U.S. Office of Price Administration and the U.S. Government Office of War Information, it’s evening of another WWII day. As Gracie

Forget The Truman Show – on madman Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s filmset-panopticon, everyone is transformed into a Soviet citizen of 1952 (Olya, Stalin-era cafeteria worker, left) as civilians act out his fantasy of lust amid mundane totalitarianism, where everyone snitches and the cameras never stop rolling… Imagine the archive!

Source: Texas Archive of the Moving Image Donor: Texas Department of Public Safety Historical Museum and Research Center Filmed in Hays County and San Marcos, c. 1950. Duration: 18’10” The Texas Department of Public Safety knows how to nail its man. 12 key moments, insights, questions, and concerns: i) Shouldn’t they bag that hammer? ii)

"The White Shadow" went missing from screens in the mid-1920s, but now it's back – at least, half of it is. A restoration of the early feature, one of the first film projects featuring Alfred Hitchcock, was a highlight of the just-completed 2011 Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Caylin Smith reports.

A former long-time United States National Archives audiovisual archivist has admitted in federal court that he stole almost 1,000 sound recordings from the Archives and sold some of them on the online auction site, eBay, in September and October, 2010.